NTM-ARENA

Site-specific festival centre / 2019

Theater and sports have a common origin. In ancient Greece, amphitheater and sport stadiums were places where the population came together to pay homage to the gods and celebrate. For the 20th International Schillertage at the Nationaltheater Mannheim (NTM), Sven Bergelt and Kai-Hendrik Windeler created an installation that links to the architecture of a multifunctional sports arena and interact with the forecourt structure of the theater. The installation refers next to the festival theme „Fever“ also to the history of the theater’s location, where until the 1950s a sport site was located. It further discusses through fragmented text extracts the current, social and political meaning of Friedrich Schiller’s letters „On the Aesthetic Education of Man“. As the architectural heart of the Schillertage, the NTM-Arena offers an intersection between the institution of the theater and the public of the city.